


Draw Back Your Bow

by PockySquirrel



Category: Power Rangers Dino Charge
Genre: Awkward Romance, F/M, Fluff, Keeper ships it
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-11-10
Updated: 2015-11-10
Packaged: 2018-04-30 22:44:33
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,178
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5182430
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PockySquirrel/pseuds/PockySquirrel
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The Dino Cupid Charger is supposed to make the target fall in love with the first thing they see. But when Chase gets struck with a bolt from the Charger and looks at Kendall, nothing happens. What can that possibly mean? Kendall is on a mission to find out.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Draw Back Your Bow

**Author's Note:**

  * For [PunkPinkPower](https://archiveofourown.org/users/PunkPinkPower/gifts).



> Unbeta'd and shamelessly self-indulgent. Dedicated to PunkPinkPower, because apparently the best remedy for both a sick day and a case of writer's block is a big ol' fluffy plot bunny.

“Just a bit more,” Kendall murmured to herself as she tinkered with the morpher.

Leave it to Shelby to get a Charger jammed in there - particularly the Cupid Charger. The Pink Ranger had already set her malfunctioning morpher off once in the effort to get the Charger unstuck, leading to poor Chase becoming the victim of friendly fire and spending several hours attempting to seduce the toaster until the effects wore off. On top of that, her effort to dislodge the Charger had only succeeded in jamming the morpher even worse, leaving Kendall with the task of performing a tedious emergency repair. 

She finally had the offending Charger almost unstuck from the morpher’s mechanical innards and was carefully jimmying it toward the barrel with the end of a flat-head screwdriver - sometimes, the low-tech solution was the best solution - when several things happened at once.

Chase rode into the base on his skateboard and cheerfully greeted her by her first name. As Kendall looked up from her work to remind him that first, he was to call her Ms. Morgan, and second, he was not to skateboard near the sensitive equipment, her attention on the position of her screwdriver faltered and her hand slipped. The Cupid Charger finally popped free from where it had been wedged, the barrel of Shelby’s morpher slammed shut and the device once again misfired, sending a bolt of energy directly at Chase. The sudden recoil of the blaster in her hand sent Kendall toppling off her seat and she landed on her backside in an undignified heap, one leg and the hem of her lab coat tangled in the office chair’s wheels. 

She righted herself, grumbling, and cursed under her breath when she caught sight of Chase lying on the floor. She scrambled to her feet and hurried over to check on him, her awareness of what the Cupid Charger could do momentarily forgotten in the face of having to deal with a potentially wounded Ranger. She was mentally berating herself for the accident - what kind of self-respecting Ranger tech had ever shot her own teammate? - when Chase stirred, eyes fluttering open to look directly up at her.

That was when Kendall remembered which Charger had been in that morpher when it went off, and realized that she was in an awful lot of trouble.

Chase grinned, the same stupid, infuriating smile he got whenever he was about to say something particularly cheesy. He didn’t disappoint.

“Well, this is a welcome sight to wake up to.”

Kendall frowned and sat back on her heels, putting some space between them. She wasn't sure what she had expected his reaction to be, but that wasn't it. If his behavior last time he had been exposed to the Cupid Charger was any indication, she would have been less surprised if he had jumped up and tried to kiss her. Granted, she would have been forced to judo-flip him right back onto the floor if he _had_ tried to kiss her, but she wouldn't have been surprised. But no, Chase was instead acting strangely...normal.

“Are you all right?” she asked cautiously.

“I think so,” Chase replied, picking himself up. “Whacked the back of my head a bit, but I've survived worse. What happened?”

“I was trying to get the Charger unstuck from Shelby’s morpher and it went off. I _thought_ you had taken a direct hit, but…” Kendall trailed off and shook her head. “Never mind.”

“Guess maybe I should listen next time you tell me not to skateboard in the base,” Chase said, sounding appropriately sheepish.

“If it takes a blow to the head to make you listen to me, then I may have to hit you on purpose next time,” Kendall shot back, exasperated. 

“I wouldn't say no to that,” Chase replied with a wink and a smirk, collected his skateboard and sauntered off before Kendall could make good on the threat. 

Alone again and thoroughly flustered, Kendall dusted herself off, righted her toppled chair and checked over Shelby’s morpher to make sure there had been no damage done to it in that little debacle. She turned her interaction with Chase over and over in her mind, and promptly reached the conclusion that something about it had just been...weird. He had taken a direct hit from the Cupid Charger, hadn't he? The first time that happened, he had started reciting romantic poetry at a kitchen appliance. He should have been following her around like a lovestruck puppy by now. Sure, he had flirted with her a little, but no more so than usual. Chase always flirted with her. Chase always flirted with everyone. This time, the Charger didn't seem to have altered his behavior at all.

Kendall set Shelby’s morpher aside and looked around for the errant device, ultimately finding that it had rolled underneath her desk. She stooped to retrieve it and plugged it into one of the machines on her desk to check its energy output. Maybe the Charger hadn't actually discharged in the misfire. Maybe its energy had been depleted. Or maybe Shelby’s morpher had simply broken the thing. Something was weird here, and curiosity demanded that she find out what.

***

The subsequent series of tests Kendall ran on the Cupid Charger yielded infuriatingly normal results. The Charger was not, in fact, broken at all, or at least not by any metric Kendall had to determine such. The Rangers then proceeded to use the Charger with great success in their next battle, which further galvanized that as fact. Her other hypothesis, that the Charger’s energy had been drained by the first misfire, had also proven incorrect. When Kendall analyzed the device’s energy level and output, she found evidence of two fully-powered discharges, and a healthy amount of power remaining in reserve after both of them. As far as she could tell, the Charger had been functioning when the morpher fired it, and that the bolt had hit Chase. Neither of those two things made it any easier to determine, then, why Chase had been seemingly immune to the effect.

She found herself paying more attention to Chase in the days that followed, and still, nothing seemed out of the ordinary. She did find, to her dismay, that her initial impression of Chase as useful but obnoxious might not have been entirely accurate. When she actually made a conscious effort of noticing him instead of just snarking at him or shooing him out of her way, he seemed to show glimpses of a personality beyond just skateboarding and goofing around. 

Watching him train with the other Rangers, he seemed protective, almost parental. It was easy to forget, given how immature he acted most of the time, that he was technically (Koda aside) the oldest person on the team. He had a younger sister, she recalled. He was used to being around people who were younger than he was, and he was used to looking after them. The idea of him treating the other Rangers like his surrogate siblings was, frankly, a little heartwarming. And as strange as that thought was, even stranger to take note of was the fact that behind Chase’s insufferable joking was a sharper wit than Kendall had given him credit for. She started to enjoy exchanging verbal jabs with him, instead of just treating it as a nuisance. Chase was smart. Smarter than Kendall had thought. 

She was talking to him in the museum roughly a week after the incident with the Cupid Charger, reviewing inventory for the kitchen or something similarly mundane, when Chase abruptly stopped and gave her a strange look.

“What?” she asked.

“I just called you Kendall,” Chase said. “And you didn’t correct me.”

“...Oh.” Kendall felt heat beginning to rise in her cheeks and wished furiously that she could stop the involuntary response. She would _not_ be caught blushing in front of Chase, dammit! What did she even have to be blushing about? “I guess I didn’t notice.”

“You always notice.” Chase’s typical smirk - which was still infuriating, for how charming it really was - crawled back onto his face, although his eyes still looked a bit worried. “If I didn’t know any better, I’d say you were going soft on me.”

“Fortunately for both of us, you do know better,” Kendall retorted. That much felt normal, at least. Chase would say something smug, and she would knock him down a peg or two. That was how things were supposed to be. 

“Of course, Ms. Morgan.” He put a teasing note into the name, but she couldn’t help noticing that his smile faltered just a little, and she wondered if she hadn’t been too hard on him.

She had never, not once in the time they had known each other, worried that she was being too hard on Chase. 

Something was definitely still weird, Kendall concluded. But she was starting to wonder if the source of the weirdness wasn’t Chase, or the Cupid Charger, but herself. 

***

“Is something troubling you, Kendall?”

Keeper’s voice, gentle though it was, proved enough to jolt Kendall out of her reverie. Somewhere in the past however long it had been since she first sat down at the computer, she had stopped working and let her thoughts wander off elsewhere. She refused to admit to herself that said ‘elsewhere’ was probably New Zealand.

“I could tell you that there wasn’t, but we both know you’ve already seen straight through me,” Kendall sighed. 

Keeper was a perceptive thing, and as strange as it was to have a vaguely reptilian-looking extraterrestrial serving as her mentor and confidant, she had to admit that the advice he gave was usually right on point. With that in mind, she reluctantly explained to Keeper the entire situation. 

“I just haven’t been able to get it out of my head,” she concluded, venting her frustration. “There isn’t a logical explanation for it. Everything was functioning normally when the accident occurred, so why wouldn’t the Cupid Charger have affected Chase?”

“I think the explanation you seek is more apparent than you think,” Keeper mused. “After all, what is it that the Cupid Charger does?”

“Induces a spontaneous hormonal surge that mimics the cognitive and emotional symptoms of extreme infatuation while simultaneously causing disinhibition and a loss of impulse control,” Kendall recited with a huff. “Or in layman’s terms, it’s a love spell.”

“It _induces_ a feeling of infatuation,” Keeper echoed. “Now, under what circumstances might an attempt to _induce_ that feeling be rendered inert?”

Kendall thought about it. And with horror, it dawned on her.

“The Charger couldn’t induce those feelings if...oh no.”

“If those feelings were already present,” Keeper finished.

Kendall took off her glasses and squeezed her eyes shut, pinching the bridge of her nose between her thumb and her forefinger. “Chase can’t be in love with me. He...I can’t deal with this right now.”

“You need not be afraid of his feelings, Kendall. Nor your own.”

“I’m not…” Kendall started to protest, but thought better of it. “Okay, I am. But that’s not even the point. The point is that neither of us can afford to be distracted by something like this. Not with Sledge still out there. We both have bigger things to worry about.”

“Strong emotion can indeed lead to weakness,” Keeper reasoned. “But they can also become a source of great strength. You have observed how the bonds of emotion - emotions of many different kinds - between the Power Rangers have made them stronger as a team. This goes for you as well, Kendall. To be honest about your feelings, whatever those may be, and to share them in spite of your fear, will create a stronger bond between you and Chase regardless of the outcome. But to hide your feelings, to deny them...that breeds mistrust and division.”

“I should talk to him about it,” Kendall agreed, reluctantly. “I _really_ don’t want to. But...I should.”

Keeper nodded his approval. 

“And if it goes badly?”

“I do not think either of you has the capacity to truly harm the other,” Keeper reassured. “Even if things go poorly, and one or both of you ends up with hurt feelings, I do not think it will create an obstacle so insurmountable that it will harm your friendship, or damage the team.”

Kendall managed a soft laugh. “You know, it almost sounds like you’re trying to set the two of us up.”

Keeper lowered his head, wearing his usual sage expression. “I believe that you would be stronger together than you are separately. That is all.”

And with that, he took his leave. Kendall returned to her musings, feeling perhaps a bit more bewildered by Keeper and his motives, but a great deal more certain as to how she was going to handle Chase.

She had a plan.

***

The next time it was just the two of them in the base together, presumably alone although one could never be certain where Keeper might be lurking, Kendall approached Chase.

“I need to borrow your morpher,” she said. “And, actually, I need to borrow you as well.”

Chase shrugged but turned it over without hesitation, and tagged along after her as she took the morpher into her lab.

“What are we doing?” he asked. 

“We are testing a Charger,” Kendall replied, retrieving the Cupid Charger from its storage cell and loading it into Chase’s morpher. Technically, that wasn’t a lie. 

“Oh, did you come up with a new one?”

“No, it’s an existing Charger. Just...one that I have reason to suspect may be malfunctioning.” Technically, that wasn’t a lie either.

“Okay. So what did you need me for?”

Kendall raised the morpher and took aim.

Chase backed away, arms raised in a gesture of surrender. “Whoa! Hey! What did I do?”

“It’s okay, Chase,” Kendall said, attempting to keep her voice even. “It isn’t going to hurt. I’m sorry for springing this on you so suddenly, but...I really need this data.” 

Chase lowered his arms, the panic ebbing out of his expression. “All right, then,” he agreed. “If that’s the case...I trust you, Kendall.”

“It’s Ms. Morgan,” she replied automatically, though really, her heart wasn’t in it.

Chase grinned. Kendall fired. 

When the initial flash faded, Kendall blinked the dots out of her vision and Chase was standing right where she had left him, looking none the worse for wear. 

“That was the Cupid Charger, wasn’t it?” he said. 

“You could tell?” Kendall asked, surprised.

“Well, certain people do seem to enjoy shooting me with it,” he joked. 

“Well, I guess that cat is out of the bag, then. How do you feel?”

Chase shrugged. “Normal?”

Kendall took a deep breath, steeling her nerves. “If that’s the case, then...I think you and I need to talk.”

The alarm went off. 

“It’ll have to wait,” Chase said. He trotted over, snatched the morpher out of Kendall’s hands, and ran out the door.

As soon as he was out of sight, Kendall took a moment to smack the heel of her hand against her forehead a couple of times before heading to the console to oversee the impending battle.

***

Once Sledge’s latest monster was thoroughly destroyed and the Rangers back to business as usual after a brief victory celebration, Chase stuck around, loitering awkwardly in the base in an effort to catch Kendall alone. Fortunately, his teammates all seemed to have someplace better to be, and even Keeper seemed to take the hint and make himself scarce. 

“You, uh. Said we needed to talk,” Chase said, sounding awkward as he approached. Kendall had all the sympathy in the world for that. She had kind of been hoping that with all the excitement of a monster fight, he would have forgotten. 

“We do.”

“Why’d you shoot me with the Cupid Charger?”

“Why didn’t you tell me how you felt about me?” Kendall countered.

Chase looked as entirely caught off guard as Kendall had ever seen him. There was no hint of the self-assured smirk on his face, and he actually looked a little pale. Kendall momentarily felt bad for being so blunt with him, even though it _was_ a valid question. 

“I didn’t think that...how did you know?”

“Remember that day I was trying to fix Shelby’s morpher, and it went off on you?” Chase nodded silently in response, and Kendall continued. “That was the Cupid Charger, too. After what happened the first time, I was expecting to have you crawling all over me like you did with the toaster. But nothing happened. I couldn’t figure out why. I had no idea why the Charger wouldn’t have worked on you again, and it was driving me nuts until I realized. The only reason why the Charger could make you fall in love with a toaster but couldn’t make you fall in love with me…”

“Would be if I was already in love with you,” Chase finished, his voice uncharacteristically soft.

“That’s why I shot you with it earlier,” Kendall explained. “I had to test it, to be sure...why didn’t you tell me?”

Chase exhaled in a short, half-hearted laugh. “Why didn’t I tell you? Why _would_ I? Let’s be honest, here. I’ve been turned down enough times to know when someone’s not interested in me, and you never exactly acted like you were interested in me. I didn’t want to be one of those guys who keeps pushing a girl to say yes to someone she doesn’t want. And I didn’t want to risk messing up the team over a stupid crush.”

“The thought of you and I as a couple had never even crossed my mind before this happened,” Kendall said, choosing her words carefully. “But the truth is, this whole thing with the Cupid Charger has made me think about it. So I’ve been thinking about it. I’ve been thinking about you. I think...I made some judgments about you when we first met. Thought some things that turned out to be wrong. And now...I think I want to get to know you better. The real you. I don’t want to mess the team up either, but...I think we both owe it to ourselves to give this a try.”

“Are you...asking me out on a date?” Chase asked, tone incredulous.

“Can we take it one day at a time?”

“Yeah,” Chase agreed, daring to take a step closer. “I’d like that, Ms. Morgan.”

In a moment of courage, Kendall reached out and took his hand. It was rough but warm, and larger than her own by enough that the gesture felt a little silly. She quickly decided that she liked the feel of it, nonetheless. 

“Then I’m asking you out on a date,” she said. “And under the circumstances, I think you had better call me Kendall.”

“Kendall,” Chase repeated with a smile. Not the one that always managed to irritate her, but something softer and more genuine. “You know, I’ve always liked the sound of that.”


End file.
